MTA’s Post-Storm Costs Run to $5 Billion

The damage wreaked by Sandy on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority began to come into clearer focus Monday, as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office released the first breakdown of $5 billion in estimated costs the agency faces from the superstorm.

Two heavily damaged areas of the New York City subway will cost a combined $1.25 billion to fix: the devastated Rockaway line, which carries the A train to the shoreline in Queens, and the South Ferry and Whitehall stations at the southern tip of Manhattan.

Restoring the A train, where large sections of track washed away by the storm surge, will cost $650 million, according to the MTA, and reconstruction of the heavily damaged South Ferry and Whitehall stations will cost another $600 million. It wasn’t initially clear if the latter figure also included the cost of repairing damage to the Montague Street tube, which carried the R train south from Whitehall to Brooklyn.

The MTA also lost money on what it didn’t do. Work stoppages and lack of access to construction materials added millions to the cost of four megaprojects that are expanding the transit network: the Second Avenue subway, extension of the No. 7 subway to the West Side, Fulton Center in Lower Manhattan, and East Side Access, which will link the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central Terminal.

None of the projects suffered direct damage, but the work stoppage created losses of more than $20 million on East Side Access alone, according to an MTA cost estimate.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey estimated that Sandy cost $841 million, including expenses from foregone airport and seaport revenue, repairs and uncollected tolls from bridges and tunnels, and $350 million to replace equipment and pump out millions of gallons of water from the site of the World Trade Center.

New York officials, led by Cuomo, have said they will seek 100% reimbursement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for the cost of restoring city and state facilities, including the transit network. The state will also seek more than $9 billion to harden infrastructure against future storm damage.